Raspberry Pi GPU Driver Turns Out To Be Crap

[bnolsen]

Oh come on, the rpi shouldn't be getting as much hate as it is. In some ways it helped to create a new market for ultra cheap computers.

The newest rpi revision with 512MB ram seems to have mostly cleared up the USB insanity the original model had. Unfortunately it also fractures the rpi community now that some developers will target 512MB and leave the 256MB crowd out in the cold. Not to mention the hordes of users who bought very buggy hardware.

The armv6 soc with vfp in many ways is a wildcat, an ancient arm core with a (relatively) rare fpu, making for a very slow soc that's a pain to support.

The ideas and goals were okay, execution? Not so great. Cubieboard rules over this thing, although it's not in mass production yet.

[blackiwid]

I don't understand why everyone is so up in arms about this.

If they would have anounced, we release a wrapper or a kernel-headers thing or something like that... and thats now easier to port the propriatary driver it would be ok... but now they claim something different, they did say we have a "fully opensourced" driver and that other companys should take a example on this... and the point is to get good press and sell more units... thats a fraud like thing.

[mangobrain]

I don't understand why everyone is so up in arms about this. It's still a great help to toolkit developers, display server developers, and anyone wanting to port operating systems other than Linux - or maybe even write their own, what with the Raspberry Pi's focus being education. It still means we don't have to wait for Broadcom to catch up if changes in newer kernels cause breakage - OK, so we can't change the GLES implementation, but we can at least keep the current one working!

As for bitching about instability, yes there have been some issues, but work on the USB driver is on-going. Personally, my two Pis are now completely stable for how I use them, so I have absolutely no complaints. Early adopters ought to expect this sort of thing, and be willing to either help, or wait it out. The Foundation got a lot more interest than they anticipated for something which was very much supposed to be an early, developer-focussed release.

[freedam]

Ok geniuses, you're RIGHT!!!

[dogsleg]

Did you even read the part that you quoted??? Fucking trolls that can't even troll properly....

Did you ever read that quote by yourself? Either you don't have eyes to read carefully and you didn't see that they claiming that they provided fully open driver, either you don't have a brain to understand their words and understand difference between their "opennes" and free/opensource software, or what?

Raspberry Pi and Broadcom are liars. That's true. I don't hate Raspberry Pi board, but I hate their marketing attempts. It's silly.

[dogsleg]

trolling the makers of a 30 euro computer for education

you should get 1. shame 2.life


many people either don't have a personal laptop or can't afford to test things with a personal laptop

what a 30 pound or euro soc allows them to do is do whatever they want without fear of bricking their expensive laptops

Don't you understand that they just lied? Their "driver" is just a wrap around firmware blob. There are two option: 1) it's not a driver, or 2) it's not fully open.

[blackiwid]

That soc doesn't work like your x86 pc, deal with it, if Michael Larabel writes articles about things he doesn't know it isn't the foundation's fault.

like I said they did claim that they released "fully opensource drivers". So you can twitch around like you want that what they did say... so they just lied... x86 or not x86 your ass thats not the question... so if you put in 90-99% of the functionality to the firmware you did lie, if you take it strong you even did lie if you do 1% in the firmware... but I am no fanatic so I would accept that at least till one other competitor goes the full way.

But to try to sell more stuff with making lies about your openess... is just immoral in the purest... if you want to make money because of your "openess" make it really open, or just say, you want/cant do it because you suck, and only people who want to be enslaved should buy your stuff... so ok so explizit no company would say that... but at least dont say the oposite when its a clear lie...

[freedam]

boah ok I do not insult you here, even I want to, because I am very pissed by this asholes... so I insult them like I should ASHOLES, go to hell...

but you at least oversee that, and they did lie:



again:



they said additionaly something about userspace some lines before that, so they said in your definition the truth and a big fuchin lie in on paragraph... so yes its allowed to be pissed of them. And at least, if you think that people are forgiving enough to you that you release a pseudo-free driver, with a firmware which anybody did know and is evil... but at least less evil you would think... then they just take all functionality to the firmware and make a wrapper around it basicly when I understand it right. Its just a pure marketing shit... in that defintion, you could even say that nvidia made some opensource drivers, because they released sourcecode to compile the kernel-stuff for other kernels...

Broadcom it could not be true...

That soc doesn't work like your x86 pc, deal with it, if Michael Larabel writes articles about things he doesn't know it isn't the foundation's fault.

[freedam]

Actually, not. Look at http://www.raspberrypi.org/. Quote:



(the second paragraph of "Open Source ARM Userland")

Michael just didn't check it and hurriedly published that "news" here.

Yeah, its a crap and epic fail for Raspberry Pi and Broadcom. They are liars! I was thinking about buying Raspberry Pi, but now I'll never ever want to. Let's see what Samsung (maybe with the help of Google) will propose us with their Exynos 5.

Did you even read the part that you quoted??? Fucking trolls that can't even troll properly....

[blackiwid]

Imho the only over hype was made by Michael, the rasperry pi site only talks about "open source USERLAND", Michael talks about a misleading "full open source graphic stack"...

boah ok I do not insult you here, even I want to, because I am very pissed by this asholes... so I insult them like I should ASHOLES, go to hell...

but you at least oversee that, and they did lie:

but it does actually mean that the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way.

again:

fully open-source drivers

they said additionaly something about userspace some lines before that, so they said in your definition the truth and a big fuchin lie in on paragraph... so yes its allowed to be pissed of them. And at least, if you think that people are forgiving enough to you that you release a pseudo-free driver, with a firmware which anybody did know and is evil... but at least less evil you would think... then they just take all functionality to the firmware and make a wrapper around it basicly when I understand it right. Its just a pure marketing shit... in that defintion, you could even say that nvidia made some opensource drivers, because they released sourcecode to compile the kernel-stuff for other kernels...

Broadcom it could not be true...